Get Into Games: New York Film Academy has designs on LA

An innovative New York game design course is celebrating its first birthday by opening up to students at its California campus.

The New York Film Academy, which teams students with professional coders, will offer courses in Los Angeles from September and aims to spread the word of experience-focused game design.

The courses, masterminded by creative director and EA Innovation Labs founder Chris Swain, divides wannabe game designers into studios of three or four who access professional coding support as they explore their creativity on platforms of their choosing.

“The overall philosophy of game design is timeless, even though the tools are constantly changing. There’s a foundation of knowledge,” explains Swain. “The professional coder idea is pretty innovative and deals with the biggest problem of game schools: students don’t have the coding skills to build anything.”

Swain says the first year of the course in New York was a “total success” and believes that, with a few tweaks, the structure is rock solid. Teaching will no longer be sandwiched around the working day of the pro coders and the eyebrow-raising improvisational acting class has been airbrushed from the class list.

“The foundation of the course is still playcentric design,” adds Swain, referring to the technique of playtesting code from the outset of a project and at every stage along the way. And he is prepared to be radical about ensuring students buy into the core notion of what constitutes an engaging experience. “In the first class we don’t let them touch the computer – they need to understand that the way playable systems work is independent of technology.”

That approach may seem a little removed from the bitter next gen hardware wars. And that suits Swain, who has a formidable track record of high-level commercial development work.

“The nature of this business is always going to be dramatic technical changes. That’s why it’s so important students have a foundation that will transcend those changes. My attitude is that it doesn’t matter what technology you are using as long as you are trying to make a great user experience. I don’t believe in technology for technology’s sake, but I do understand that it is inherent in this ‘game’. You choose the technology for strategic reasons.”

Swain encourages students to explore their passions without over-thinking the monetisation of their work. He cites playable installations at LA’s GiantRobot game art gallery and Frank Lantz’s large-scale physical games as evidence that great play experiences can be born from barely-challenged creativity. “Let it flow. It doesn’t fit into boxes. If someone is really artistic and dying to do something that’s not commercial – if they use playcentric, they will get a job in games anyway.”

Swain’s point celebrates the individuality of game design, which means a course that is overly prescriptive in the wrong direction could only serve to stifle students. At NYFA he provides parameters to explore and a few rubberised rules to play with. “It’s useful to have a definition of a game – that it has a clear objective, unequal outcome and structured conflict – so you can decide if you are designing a game or an activity.” He notes that by those roles The Sims is an activity and Minecraft passes muster because as a toolkit enables you to create games.

“One of the challenges when you write about games or really study them is there are so many ways to define them. Any place you can get an intellectual foothold is valuable,” he adds. “No-one has come up with a tidy way of categorising game mechanics. People who have have largely made things pedantic to the point no-one can follow it. I believe in theory for practitioners – theory that will help you as a practitioner. Theory for theory’s sake is too pedantic.”

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